Some Words From Walter Lantz

Walter Lantz was still busy in his 80s, though he wasn’t making cartoons any more. He was travelling here and there, being honoured and giving interviews.

Here are a couple of newspaper features from 1982, one without a byline. Ignore the canard about Woody Woodpecker being invented on Lantz’ honeymoon a year after he debuted on screen, and the one about Woody’s laugh being based on a bugle call. The first story is from May 19th, the second from November 18th. The photos were grabbed off the internet and didn’t come with the stories.

Incidentally, regarding Lantz’s age in these stories, his birth year was given as 1900 at the time of his death. It was learned afterward he was actually born in 1899.

Cartoonist Walter Lantz: 60 years with one studio
By Bob Thomas
Associated Press Writer
HOLLYWOOD — It might not make the Guinness Book of Records, but in the transitory movie world, a 60-year contract with a single studio is nothing less than phenomenal.
Walter Lantz, father of Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda, Chilly Willy the penguin and a host of other cartoon stars, recently signed another contract with Universal Pictures, with which he started in 1927. The new deal extends to 1987, when Lantz expects to still be going strong at 87.
"That's not all that's happening," says the stubby, energetic Lantz. "Woody is going to be in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade this year for the first time. And we're opening an exhibit on the Universal Studio Tour that will include a lot of our memorabilia and a 15-minute documentary that we just filmed.
"All of our licensees are sending products for the exhibit. We have over 100 products, everything from T-shirts, shoes, dolls to pens, pencils, pads, stationery."
Walter Lantz Productions now operates at offices in the former Technicolor building in the heart of Hollywood. Lantz gave up cartoon-making five years ago. He explains: "I quit when I discovered I was paying $50,000 for a six-minute short that cost $12,000 to $15,000 in the 1930s. I've always financed my own pictures and I said, 'Hell, I'll go broke if I stay in production.' It's lucky I quit. Those cartoons would cost $100,000 today."
Universal continues to release 13 Lantz cartoons a year to the world's theaters, as well as 185 to television. Lantz is planning to produce half-hour and hour specials for TV. There's plenty to keep him and Gracie busy.
Grace is Walter's sprightly 79-year-old wife and the voice of Woody Woodpecker. The story is that when they were honeymooning in 1950, a pesky woodpecker pounded on the roof of their cabin at nearby Lake Sherwood.
"That's how we got the idea for Woody," Lantz recalls. "Mel Blanc did the voice at first. Then Warner Bros. signed him to an exclusive contract, and Gracie took over. She's been doing Woody for 32 years."
Woody's loony manner and "ah-ah-ah-HA-ha" laugh became a national sensation, and Lantz had found the biggest star in a cartoon career that began in 1915. As a boy, he began washing brushes for Winsor McCay, who had started a cartoon studio for William Randolph Hearst. Lantz worked his way up through the New York animation studios, moved to Hollywood as a gag writer for Mack Sennett in 1926, started making cartoons for Universal a year later. "I've lasted through seven regimes at Universal," he says wonderingly.
The secret of his longevity?
"Making cartoons for theaters, I always aimed for things that would make people laugh. We did stories that didn't require dialogue, and we never made them topical. That's why they don't age.
"I've always liked slapstick humor, broad gags that create bellylaughs. I know cartoons have been criticized as too violent. But nobody dies, nobody bleeds, nobody gets hurt. I've never received a letter from a parent or a schoolteacher complaining that my cartoons were too violent or had racial slurs."
Lantz has found another way to make Woody Woodpecker pay off. He spends a few hours a day at oil paintings of Woody in poses like Mona Lisa and Blueboy. A Honolulu gallery sells them at prices ranging from $10,000 to $30,000, Lantz said proudly.

Woody Woodpecker take his place in Smithsonian
WASHINGTON (UPI) — If the Gallup Poll were to conduct a survey to determine the five most popular movie cartoon characters in cinema history, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Popeye and Woody Woodpecker surely would be high up on the list.
Only one, however - Woody Woodpecker - has been honored with an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution.

That distinction was recorded Tuesday when 17 Woody Woodpecker artifacts went on display in the Smithsonian's Museum of American History.
They were now part of the popular-entertainment collection, along with such other museum-pieces as the ruby slippers Judy Garland wore in "The Wizard of Oz" and the jailhouse door from the set of the "Barney Miller" television series.
The Woody Woodpecker objects were donated to the museum by Walter Lantz, 82, pioneer animated film producer who created the first WW cartoon in 1940.
As Lantz tells it, he got the idea while on his honeymoon. A real woodpecker kept waking up the newly weds early in the morning by rapping on their cottage roof, he said.
The bride, not incidentally, was actress Grace Stafford, who subsequently became the voice of Woody. Her speciality, which she has done countless times in her 10 years of dubbing, is the famous woodpecker laugh.
Lantz said the laugh originally was based on a six-note bugle call. However, the way Mrs. Lantz does it, only five notes are detectable.
Woody's first cartoon, in which the woodpecker played second banana to Andy Panda, was called "Knock, Knock." A copy was among the treasures Lantz presented to the museum.
In all, he produced about 400 Woody Woodpecker cartoons, a feat described by Douglas Evelyn, the museum's deputy director as "a truly profound accomplishment."
In accepting "a gift of great significance," Evelyn did not indicate why the Smithsonian honored an animated woodpecker rather than, say, a mouse, a duck or a rabbit.
It could, be that Walt Disney's creations are legally restricted to amusement park promotion. Woody Woodpecker has never been associated with a venture of that sort; although he was the subject of a 1947 hit song Lantz said he quite making cartoons in 1976 because "It got to be so expensive." A six-minute Woody Woodpecker film required 7,000 drawings, 73 staff artists, an original score and four weeks of production time, he said.
For the short, balding animator, the Smithsonian ceremony was the highlight of 55 years of work for the same studio.